Seasonal Music - A research into what makes some songs more suited to the summer, and others to the winter.
Seasonal Music
Imagine a setting where you have just had your family Christmas dinner. You all sit together around the fireplace drinking a hot chocolate, when your father suddenly turns on Despacito by Luis Fonsi. Although it is just a song like any other, the consensus will be that it is absolutely not a song that fits the setting.
In 2019 researchers already found a difference in the way people listen to music throughout the year (Park et al., 2019). The most famous example of a song that is mainly played in certain times of the year is, of course, All I Want For Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey. When taking a look at the amount of people that use the search term ‘All I Want For Christmas’ on Google throughout the past 5 year, it is clearly seen that in specific parts of the year the popularity spikes [1]. And although the reasons may be clear for Mariah Carey’s tracks, there is no straightforward explanation why we listen to certain songs more in the summer and others in the winter.
In this storyboard, there will be taken a look into what makes a specific track a ‘summer song’, and what makes a track a ‘winter song’. This will be done by comparing two official Spotify created playlists. The first playlist is called Summer ’22, and the other playlist is called The Winter Chill, which both consist of 100 songs. They can be previewed and played on the right.
These playlist have been chosen because they are both made by the official Spotify account. This means that they are generally considered to be a good representation of what users think are summer and winter songs respectively. The fact they are made by Spotify also means that there is less personal bias in both the playlists, meaning they are very useful to do general research on.
In this research, the Spotify API will be used to try and discover what the specific differences are between summer and winter songs and which features are more present in one or the other category. The expectations are that summer songs are more ‘happy’ and faster paced, while the winter songs are supposed to be slower, more acoustic and less happy.
Happiness - Looking into whether summer songs are happier than winter songs
Are summer songs happier?
As said before, many people would describe summer music as being happy and uplifting. Music that you could dance to or sing along with. While winter music would be said to be more calm and melancholic. To test this, the Spotify API is used, which can measure many features of a track, such as it’s loudness, instrumentalness or danceability.
The question now is, how do we measure the ‘happiness’ of a song? One of the spotify measurable audio features is ‘energy’, which looks at the intensity or activity of a song. Another feature is ‘valence’, which is described as a measure of musical positiveness, where a high valence means a more happy or euphoric track.
In the figure on the left we can see for every track in the playlist where they score in terms of energy and valence. It is visible that the blue winter songs, on average, score a lot lower on both energy and valence than the summer songs. This means that a song with a high energy and/or valence is more likely to be considered a summer song!
Acousticness, Keys and Tempi - Which other differences can we find between summer and winter songs?
note: The goal was to make this page interactive, and let the user select which feature to show on this page. This worked, but took very long computationally, which is why it was decided to just place all histograms in picture format next to each other on this page.
Acousticness
When picturing a song that suits the winter, usually people picture a more melancholic song, with an acoustic guitar or piano and slow vocals. A feature that best measures this, is the acousticness feature, which measures to what extent a certain track is acoustic or not.
On the left we can see the acousticness of both the summer playlist and the winter playlist compared to each other in a single histogram.
On the x-axis the acousticness scale is displayed, and on the y-axis the amount of times that that acousticness is found in the summer or winter playlist respectively.
It is noticeable that for winter songs the acousticness is very diverse and can range anywhere from 0 to 1. On average however, winter songs are more acoustic than summer songs. These are mainly very non-acoustic, with over 80 of the 100 tracks having less than 0.25 on the acousticness-scale.
Keys
Besides acousticness it is possible to generate a histogram that demonstrates the keys of the tracks in the two different playlists. With on the x-axis the keys (translated to numerical from actual key values), and on the y-axis the count.
The two histograms for the summer and winter playlists are quite comparable in terms of key, with the only notable outlier being that there are no summer songs with the ‘number 3’-key, which is the D# (or Eb).
Tempi
The third histogram displays the different tempo of the tracks on both playlists. It is noticeable that once again for winter songs the histogram is more spread out than for summer songs. Most summer songs are around the 128bpm region, and especially when looking at the lower tempo songs the summer songs get significantly less common.
Although the average of both playlists are pretty close together (126bpm for summer and 118 for winter), the histogram is still pretty insightful, since it shows the difference in the distribution of the two playlists.
Visualizations
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Visualizations
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Keygram and Tempogram - a continuation on the key and tempo histograms for a specific track
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Classifier - Can we use the data to make predictions about songs and whether they are summer or winter tracks?
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Literature
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